Jonathan Cook

Sham or shame? Israel's policy on aid groups is both

As protests raged again across the Middle East, Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, offered his assessment of the Arab Spring last week. It was, he said, an "Islamic, anti-western, anti-liberal, anti-Israeli, undemocratic wave," adding that Israel’s Arab neighbors were "moving not forwards, but backwards."

It takes some chutzpah – or, at least, epic self-delusion – for Israel’s prime minister to be lecturing the Arab world on liberalism and democracy at this moment.

In recent weeks, a spate of anti-democratic measures have won support from Netanyahu’s right wing government, justified by a new security doctrine: see no evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil of Israel. If the legislative proposals pass, the Israeli courts, Israel’s human rights groups and media, and the international community will be transformed into the proverbial three monkeys.

Israel’s vigilant human rights community has been the chief target of this assault. Yesterday Netanyahu’s Likud faction and the Yisrael Beiteinu party of his far-right foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, proposed a new law that would snuff out much of the human rights community in Israel.

The bill effectively divides non-governmental organizations (NGOs) into two kinds: those defined by the right as pro-Israel and those seen as "political," or anti-Israel. The favored ones, such as ambulance services and universities, will continue to be lavishly funded from foreign sources, chiefly wealthy private Jewish donors from the United States and Europe.

The "political" ones – meaning those that criticize government policies, especially relating to the occupation – will be banned from receiving funds from foreign governments, their main source of income. Donations from private sources, whether Israeli or foreign, will be subject to a crippling 45 per cent tax.

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Gilad Atzmon

An editorial in the London Jewish Chronicle in 1896 anti-
cipates little hope for the scheme to create a Jewish State.

As always, the London Jewish Chronicle (JC) is providing us with an accurate insight into Jewish influence within the media and beyond. The JC is desperate to stop my book, The Wandering Who? -- and it is also foolish enough to disclose its tactics, openly revealing to us the pressure which some elements within the Jewish community are willing to mount on Britain’s leading newspapers and other outlets.

This weekend The JC seems to be particularly frustrated, explaining to their concerned readers that “Britain's largest book distribution database company has said it cannot withdraw The Wandering Who unless the title is found to have breached race hate legislation”

And yet, it seems that no one in the Jewish Chronicle has read the book, or any of my writing -- otherwise it is hard to explain why the JC keep labeling me as an ‘anti-Semite’ or a ‘racist’. Had the JC actually bothered to read my writing or taken the time to follow my speeches and debates, they would have realised that there is no trace of ‘racism’ or ‘anti-Semitism’ in my work: yes, I am critical of Jewish politics; yes I am an opponent of Jewish political power, and yes, I follow my duties as a humanist to expose Jewish identity politics for what it really is. This fact alone may explain why my book is supported by respected humanists and some of the most distinguished academics, all of whom are held in high regard in their fields and beyond.

The JC complains that “in the book Atzmon discusses his belief that ‘the Holocaust religion was well-established’ before the Nazis carried out aspects of the Shoah including the Final Solution and Kristallnacht.”

The JC is absolutely correct here. That is exactly what I am discussing. And yet, the question is, what is wrong with doing so? Is it racist or anti-Semitic? And indeed, I also insist that trauma is inherent to Jewish Culture.

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John Pilger

The High Court in London will soon to decide whether Julian Assange is to be extradited to Sweden to face allegations of sexual misconduct. At the appeal hearing in July, Ben Emmerson QC, counsel for the defence, described the whole saga as "crazy". Sweden's chief prosecutor had dismissed the original arrest warrant, saying there was no case for Assange to answer. Both the women involved said they had consented to have sex. On the facts alleged, no crime would have been committed in Britain.

However, it is not the Swedish judicial system that presents a "grave danger" to Assange, say his lawyers, but a legal device known as a Temporary Surrender, under which he can be sent on from Sweden to the United States secretly and quickly. The founder and editor of WikiLeaks, who published the greatest leak of official documents in history, providing a unique insight into rapacious wars and the lies told by governments, is likely to find himself in a hell hole not dissimilar to the "torturous" dungeon that held Private Bradley Manning, the alleged whistleblower. Manning has not been tried, let alone convicted, yet on 21 April, President Barack Obama declared him guilty with a dismissive "He broke the law".

This Kafka-style justice awaits Assange whether or not Sweden decides to prosecute him. Last December, the Independent disclosed that the US and Sweden had already started talks on Assange's extradition. At the same time, a secret grand jury - a relic of the 18th century long abandoned in this country - has convened just across the river from Washington, in a corner of Virginia that is home to the CIA and most of America's national security establishment. The grand jury is a "fix", a leading legal expert told me: reminiscent of the all-white juries in the South that convicted blacks by rote. A sealed indictment is believed to exist.

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Gilad Atzmon

So the shekel has dropped. The notorious Zionist, pro-war, Islamophobic, Harry’s Place has finally woken up. At long last it attempts to engage - and, for the first time ever, to engage intellectually. Perhaps someone at the centre of Israel Cyber Command has at last gathered that urgent, strategic rethinking is now desperately needed.

So far, every effort to destroy The Wandering Who? has backfired. Last week’s orchestrated attack led by the Jewish Chronicle, the Guardian and war-advocate Jeffrey Goldberg ended in vain. The book wasn’t pulled, but we were given a telling glimpse into the embarrassing continuum between the hardcore Zionist praxis and the onanist AZZ ( Anti-Zionist Zionist) discourse. If you want to know how the Guardian ended up in bed with both the Jewish Chronicle and ex-concentration camp guard Jeffrey Goldberg, I suggest you read The Wandering Who?.

As usual, the Guardian listened to the wrong people and so grossly miscalculated its position, power and influence. Its outrageous attack on Alison Weir, Counterpunch and myself was not picked by a single dissident journal around the globe. In fact, it led Jonathan Cook, the most respected writer on Palestine, to expose what he defined as the Guardian’s “Dangerous Cult”. Unlike the Guardian piece that was left hanging out to dry on some rabid Zionist sites, Cook’s article was reprinted by every dissident outlet on the net.

However, Harry’s Place seems to be slightly more sophisticated. This week, they were quick enough to sense that a change of tactics is needed.

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Jonathan Cook

A Thought Police for the Internet Age

There could be no better proof of the revolution – care of the internet – occurring in the accessibility of information and informed commentary than the reaction of our mainstream, corporate media.

For the first time, Western publics – or at least those who can afford a computer – have a way to bypass the gatekeepers of our democracies. Data our leaders once kept tightly under wraps can now be easily searched for, as can the analyses of those not paid to turn a blind eye to the constant and compelling evidence of Western hypocrisy. Wikileaks, in particular, has rapidly eroded the traditional hierarchical systems of information dissemination.

The media – at least the supposedly leftwing component of it – should be cheering on this revolution, if not directly enabling it. And yet, mostly they are trying to co-opt, tame or subvert it. Indeed, progressive broadcasters and writers increasingly use their platforms in the mainstream to discredit and ridicule the harbingers of the new age.

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Medialens
Medialens

[Part 2] One of the main headlines on the BBC news homepage earlier this month read, 'Violence erupts at Israel borders'. Israeli soldiers had shot dead at least 12 protesters and injured dozens more. BBC 'impartiality' decreed that the brutal killings were presented almost as an act of nature, a volcanic eruption that simply happened.

Clicking on the link did at least bring up a more accurate headline: 'Israeli forces open fire at Palestinian protesters'. But the brutality was sanitised, with no details of the many victims. The Israeli viewpoint was prominent with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu saying that he 'hoped' that 'calm and quiet will quickly return, but let nobody be mistaken, we are determined to defend our borders and sovereignty'.

Somehow a 'neutral' BBC perspective dictated that the lead image illustrating the story was of young Palestinian men throwing rocks in 'clashes' with fully armed soldiers from the Israeli Defence Forces.

The Palestinians had been taking part in annual protests on Nakba ('Catastrophe') day which, as the BBC put it, 'marks the moment when 100,000s of Palestinians lost their homes' on the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. Again, the BBC's sanitised version of 'lost their homes' buries awkward history, as though homes had simply been repossessed when families fell behind on their mortgage payments. In reality, more than half of Palestine's native population, close to 800,000 people, had been uprooted and 531 villages destroyed (Ilan Pappe, 'The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine', Oneworld, 2006).

After complaints from us, and perhaps realising the newspeak was just too much to swallow, the BBC tweaked the sentence the following day to read:

'Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled or were forced out of their homes in fighting after its creation.'

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Jonathan Cook
The Jonathan Cook website

Last week the Guardian, Britain’s main liberal newspaper, ran an exclusive report on the belated confessions of an Iraqi exile, Rafeed al-Janabi, codenamed “Curveball” by the CIA. Eight years ago, Janabi played a key behind-the-scenes role -- if an inadvertent one -- in making possible the US invasion of Iraq. His testimony bolstered claims by the Bush administration that Iraq’s president, Saddam Hussein, had developed an advanced programme producing weapons of mass destruction.

Curveball’s account included the details of mobile biological weapons trucks presented by Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, to the United Nations in early 2003. Powell’s apparently compelling case on WMD was used to justify the US attack on Iraq a few weeks later.

Eight years on, Curveball revealed to the Guardian that he had fabricated the story of Saddam’s WMD back in 2000, shortly after his arrival in Germany seeking asylum. He told the paper he had lied to German intelligence in the hope his testimony might help topple Saddam, though it seems more likely he simply wanted to ensure his asylum case was taken more seriously.

For the careful reader -- and I stress the word careful -- several disturbing facts emerged from the report.

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Jonathan Cook
The National

NAZARETH // It is called Spot & Shoot. Operators sit in front of a TV monitor from which they can control the action with a PlayStation-style joystick. The aim: to kill. Played by: young women serving in the Israeli army. Spot & Shoot, as it is called by the Israeli military, may look like a video game but the figures on the screen are real people - Palestinians in Gaza - who can be killed with the press of a button on the joystick.

The female soldiers, located far away in an operations room, are responsible for aiming and firing remote-controlled machine-guns mounted on watch-towers every few hundred metres along an electronic fence that surrounds Gaza. The system is one of the latest "remote killing" devices developed by Israel's Rafael armaments company, the former weapons research division of the Israeli army and now a separate governmental firm.

According to Giora Katz, Rafael's vice president, remote-controlled military hardware such as Spot & Shoot is the face of the future. He expects that within a decade at least a third of the machines used by the Israeli army to control land, air and sea will be unmanned. The demand for such devices, the Israeli army admits, has been partly fuelled by a combination of declining recruitment levels and a population less ready to risk death in combat.

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Kev Boyle
No One To Vote For

What does it mean that we have a respected religion being practiced in the UK whose 'Holy Book' contains the material quoted below? One can only gasp that any writer could commit such thoughts to paper. Could any document possibly be more hate-filled or hateful?

It was the Pharisees who created this branch of Judaism. Is it any wonder that Christ condemned them as being "of Satan" and of being "blind guides" to their Jewish flock. We might wonder how it is that Christianity and Islam are under regular attack in the U.K. as a result of various recent parliamentary laws and increasingly malign attention from the mainstream media...whilst THIS RELIGION remains entirely untouched. What does this fact tell us about who is in charge in this country?

The quotes below are here. I know that the majority of Jewish people know little or nothing about this horrible book but they should ask themselves this question: IS IT RIGHT THAT YOU CONTINUE TO GIVE YOUR ALLEGIANCE TO A ZIONIST LEADERSHIP THAT IS OBVIOUSLY INSPIRED BY IT?

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Khalid Amayreh

I understand that the term "Jewish Nazism" is harsh, shocking and might well be provocative and offensive to many, especially those adhering to the Jewish faith. I have nothing against the Jewish faith per se, but I do detest the absurd but widespread use of Judaism to justify decidedly racist and criminal conduct as is happening in occupied Palestine these days.

I am not going to spend time arguing why the use of the above-mentioned term is justified. In the final analysis, when Jews, or anyone else for that matter, think, behave and act in a Nazi way, we should have no compunctions or hesitation comparing them to Nazis.

Today, Zionist circles are waging a rabid campaign aimed at convincing as many Western institutions to deal with and treat Israel as above the laws of mankind based on the fallacious myth that Jews are intrinsically superior to the rest of mankind.

Proponents of this evil racism may not use the same words mentioned, probably for fear of a public relations backlash, but this is exactly what they mean.

Two years ago, for example, Israel urged the United States and a number of other western states to see to it that international laws, especially the Fourth Geneva Convention, be amended in a way that would allow Israeli soldiers to commit war crimes and crimes against humanity with impunity.

In other words, Israel wants to be accorded a special treatment by the community of nations in order to be able to murder, incinerate, and maim innocent civilians, even on a large, e.g. genocidal, scale, without being held accountable, prosecuted or even criticized.

To put it bluntly, Israel wants to act the Nazi way, e.g. commit genocidal crimes as it did in the Gaza Strip around this time two years ago, but without being called Nazi or any other similar epithet.

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